⎝ˋ ƒ ´ ᖴᒪᗩᖶᖻ

📯 Known as Thewf, trod with a cat’s trepidation through the sepulchral silence of the fallen keep. His goal was but one: to liberate gold and curious artefacts from their age-old repose and trade them for earthly comforts. The air hung thick with the dust of centuries and a palpable malice that gnawed at the soul. He passed through halls where phantasmal whispers coiled about him like serpents, and circumvented pits that gaped with a hunger not of this earth. Yet, his avarice was a shield against the spectral dread. At last, in a chamber bathed in a sickly, self-generated luminescence, he beheld his prize: a hoard of trinkets and a small casket of tarnished gold. There, amidst the coins, lay a copper brooch, ancient and unadorned but for a stone of deepest black that seemed not to reflect light, but to devour it. With a covetous hand, he reached for it. The moment his fingers closed upon the cold metal, the world dissolved. A vertigo most profound seized him; the very substance of his being seemed torn asunder and woven back together in an instant of exquisite agony. He found himself prostrate upon a cold, smooth floor, his limbs possessed of a strange and grievous weakness. Lifting a trembling hand before his eyes, he beheld not the strong, cunning digits of a master pilferer, but the gnarled, spotted claws of extreme age. His body was a prison of brittle bone and aching sinew. A looking-glass upon a nearby wall showed him the visage of a stranger—a hollow-cheeked, ancient man, his own eyes staring back from deep, shadowed sockets. He had been flung into a future where his stolen gold was but a memory, his strength a phantom. In that harrowing moment, the utter vanity of his grasping life was laid bare before him, a lesson written in the wrinkles upon his face. A young nurse, her countenance marked by a professional pity, tended to him. As the final, cold shadows gathered at the edge of his sight, he perceived the glint of a small golden cross that hung from a chain about her neck, resting upon her breast. A spark, the last ember of his innate cunning, flickered within his fading heart. With a final, desperate ruse of a feeble gesture, he beckoned her closer. As she leaned in, his ancient hand, with a speed that belied its decrepitude, darted forth—not in plea, but in theft. The chain snapped, and the cross was clutched tight within his palm. He did not meet his end with a prayer, but with the faint, rictus grin of a knave triumphant. The gold was cold in his hand, and the darkness took him, smiling.